UK Treasury Committee wants explanations from NatWest and Barclays over service disruptions

Judging from the frequency at which IT issues plague banking and payment services in the UK, it appears that such problems are unavoidable. Over the past 24 hours, technical issues have affected the operations of NatWest and Barclays, prompting the UK Treasury Committee to seek explanations about the disruptions.

UK Treasury Committee chair Nicky Morgan is calling for Natwest and Barclays to respond amid service failures affecting customers over the past 24 hours.

Rt Hon. Nicky Morgan MP has written to Jes Staley, Chief Executive Officer of Barclays, and Ross McEwan, Chief Executive Officer of RBS Group, to find out what has gone wrong, the extent of the failure, and how both banks intend to compensate customers who suffered losses as a result.

Commenting on the correspondence, Mrs Morgan said:

“This is yet another addition to the litany of failures of banking IT systems. Potentially millions of customers could be affected by uncertainty and disruption.

“It simply isn’t good enough to expose customers to IT failures, including delays in paying bills and an inability to access their own money.

“High street banks justify the closure of their branch networks on the basis that they are providing a seamless online and mobile phone banking service. These justifications carry little weight if their banking apps and websites cannot be relied upon.

“The Bank of England has recently announced it will begin to run IT stress tests on banks. These can’t come soon enough.”

Mrs Morgan has demanded explanations from top ranking executives of a number of UK financial services firms over tech disruptions during the past several months. A prominent example is TSB. Then, there were the demands for additional information about service disruptions at Visa and PayPoint.